As you may recall, I was intrigued by Zadie Smith's New Yorker article about how Charles Dickens kept pushing his way into her new historical novel, The Fraud. So I thought I would read and review The Fraud here, with an emphasis on Dickens's role in it.
I regret to say I could not finish the book. I tried hard, but I couldn't. Smith does have a marvelous way with words, and I thought for a while that would carry me through, but I couldn't deal with her characters — her clueless William Harrison Ainsworth; his shrill second wife, Sarah; and least of all her point-of-view character, Eliza Touchet.
Eliza is one of those anachronisms so beloved of modern novelists, from YA to literary fiction: a pious Victorian widow who has rough sex indiscriminately with half the people she comes across, without a second thought. I don't think I'm a prude — I don't require my reading matter to be scrubbed clean of all sexual references — but I'm weary of this nonsensical trope of characters who treat sex like a handshake, often in direct and yet casual opposition to their era or belief system or any number of other conventions. It's become boilerplate writing, and boilerplate is beneath someone of Smith's talent.
Beyond that, most of her characters didn't seem to like each other or themselves very much, and their author didn't seem to like them either. Spending time with them was becoming emotionally exhausting.
So I gave up on the story. But I did skip ahead a little just to get an idea of how Dickens featured in it, and I thought I'd share a bit of that with you, in lieu of a proper review. The following is an excerpt from the chapter "Dickens is Dead!":
On the high street, at sunset, he was everywhere, like a miasma. Everybody she passed seemed to have Bill or Nancy on their lips, or Gradgrind, or Peggotty, or a dozen others, and confronted with so much prompting, Mrs Touchet herself grew suggestible. She began thinking of that second-hand clothes shop on Monmouth Street, which the young Boz, by merely observing, had rendered so startlingly animate, filling all the vacant dresses and coats and shoes in the window with a cast of humans, each one convincing, conjured in a sentence, over-brimming with — life. What looked like life. Mrs Touchet did not believe that souls were fully contained or described by coats and shoes. But she knew she lived in an age of things, no matter how out of step she felt in it, and whatever else he was, Charles had been the poet of things. He had made animate and human the cold traffic and bitter worship of things. The only way she could make sense of the general mourning was to note that with his death an age of things now mourned itself.
This is exceptionally good writing, regardless of whether you agree with its conclusion. (It's true that Eliza, loyal to the failed novelist Ainsworth, nurses a longstanding resentment against Dickens, and thus appears as a biased character. But it's also true that Smith, as we know from her article, harbors a few resentments of her own. So it's probably safe to take this as at least somewhat representative of her own position.) It crystallizes something essential about Dickens in a pithy turn of phrase: "the poet of things." The fact that Eliza twists it into what sounds like an accusation of materialism, which I think is way off the mark, doesn't alter the fundamental truth of the original insight.
And that sort of thing is why I'm genuinely sorry I couldn't finish The Fraud — the premise was fascinating and, as you can see, the prose very promising. Maybe what it needed, ironically, was a touch of Dickensian feeling. For all his faults, Dickens never brought this sort of world-weary scorn to his own creations — and the affection he infused into them, for his own characters and for his readers, is a major reason we're still reading and loving them today.
(Note: As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.)
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